Review of Democracy Boulevard

in Aufgabe 1 (2001) 

PRESENCE AND PERMEABILITY
by Brian Strang

To read Kit Robinson’s Democracy Boulevard is to be allowed to witness the world from a rare calm, centered perspective that allows insight and focus while fully engaged with the accelerated world of which it is a part and to which it is inextricably tied. Upon entering the book—and it is easy for the reader to think of the book as a location or series of locations, both transient and permanent—the reader quickly encounters the central idea or mode of operation behind the work, the relationship of the person to the world.

In “The Person,” Robinson explores the idea of the person as “a way of doing something, never explicitly experienced as such, because it is the world that is felt, its mute pressure filling out the corners, as of a rhyme.” The boundary between person and world is thin and fragile at best, more likely transparent, as the “emblems in an elaborate game whose rules the person is only beginning to understand” flood attention and influence the person: “The room gathers each sitter in.” Only occasionally is one allowed true comprehension of the meaning of the images of the world, “through an illness or brush with death,” stripping away the symbols, the stand-ins for meaning:

Under all the symbols-
going out to eat, letters,
punctuation, full motion video-
there is life-indescribable, not
to be denied. And under
life-nothing.
          – from “Transmission”

While Robinson maintains the distance and quiescence that an objective stance allows, the poems are as shaped by this world as they are by the writer; they are not Orphic transmissions from beyond but the meditative clarity of here, as rarely experienced, with little mediation:

Information Week

Jar brain loose from presentation
a table
three men a window behind the one speaking
occasionally one of them turns a page

Robinson seems to be able to jar his brain loose from the constructs of daily life, especially work life which figures heavily in Democracy Boulevard, in a way that allows him to occupy the moment, rather than escape from it, and record rather than construct or evaluate. “Information Week” has both the immediacy of a scribbled napkin note and the crisp elegance of minimalist form.

In Democracy Boulevard, Robinson also reveals his considerable range as a poet, writing extended single poems in addition to the shorter serial poems. As the product of dissent, they are, sometimes, “a junkyard of mangled signs heaped up in silent protest against a century devoted to the material possession of form.” “The Messianic Trees” and “The Rude Bridge” embody this approach of piling up images and symbols in language upon itself, taking on the disorder of anarchic protest but maintaining complexity through unlikely, undulating syllogisms and even, at times, an almost lyrical beauty as in the following section from “The Rude Bridge:”

Out of blindness
rhythm the succession of ties
switches
flower bank
legs crossed
in a pinch
I have no idea
and will fight for it
edging morning sneezes
blue Pacific rim

And later in the same poem:

Flight simulation
movie disposal
lab report
guy talking
to big white tulip
water running
through pipes in wall
paint the ceiling
then do the floor

This construct, “the person,” that Robinson discusses in the first piece is a “cliché-ridden isomorph, a creature of habit. One has certain convictions, obsessions, eccentricities, stylistic features, indications that set one, by prescription, apart.” But, according to Robinson, what is more essential is that which is elusive, that which avoids deadening definition and categorization. Though Robinson uses both a straightforward discursive mode and more abstract language-oriented methods, at times the poems don’t fall neatly into either type. Often they seem to be building toward something in a syllogistic manner only to slip out of the reader’s comprehensive grasp at the last moment, inhabiting the space between conventional meaning-making and abstraction, rewarding the reader with complexity.

Weight, as in the weight of these words, coalesces around a manner of speaking, charged up, occasional, and like France, twice its normal size. By the time you get to the end of it you are reminded of the very beginning, when so many shapes could be made out in what later turned out to be the world.
          – from “Equanimity”

There is an exchange of influence in Democracy Boulevard between the person and the world. “It is the world that is felt, but it is a made place, and within it they make it who alter its composition simply by living and doing as they will and can do,” explains Robinson in “The Person.” Again, the writing is slippery, difficult to categorize, because although the shaping influence oscillates, from person to world and back again, it is often balanced somewhere between, refusing to be pinned down, not coming to rest in the familiar “I” nor in the overwhelming exterior. In “Distribution,” Robinson jokes,

…The objective and sub-
jective elements of the work
seem to be evenly distributed,
eh, monsieur chair?

And more seriously, in “The Messianic Trees,” evoking timelessness and specificity, he both describes and eludes:

Not knowing
not explaining
not repeating
just sitting
waiting
for the garbage trucks of morning
thus the twentieth century caves
in around the edges
in anticipation of night
the long seminar

Robinson negotiates a largely artificial landscape in Democracy Boulevard, one of hotel rooms, business meetings, industrial parks and lobbies, the most “made” of places. The titles of the last four serial poems echo, in their dry, corporate language, the world they are derived from: “High Technology,” “Media Studies,” Hospitality Suite,” “Agriculture, Mining and Construction.” And although many of the poems are grounded in specific geography-the titles in “Hospitality Suite” are all locations, many of them hotels-they are, with some exceptions, synthetic, transient locations, a world that may fall over at any instant, one that changes rapidly, creating dislocation, displacement.

Infrastructure Park

Go outside and walk around
no reason to go in any particular direction
nothing to see
no people
nature=the sun
this is the West
trunk lines underground
telecommunications, transportation, and utilities
what once was fields
will some day be something again
meanwhile
your guess is as good as mine
and then some

But in this environment is a clarity and sense of humor that is “not to be denied.” There is an urgent necessity to this writing that “impresses its mark on the spirit;” it is “an insistence lived, a laugh in the face of horror.” Kit Robinson is able to engage fully with the world and the society he lives in and at the same time remain aware, insistent and alive. He show us, through his writing, how to face down the barrage of symbols, with open eyes and an open heart.

© Brian Strang. All rights reserved.